June 24, 2014

Floundering, fear and a modicum of loathing at the EU.

And you think the U.S. economy proceeds at a limp and that citizen faith in leadership is waning? See The Perils of Merkelvellianism in England's enduring The Economist. It begins:

The European Union is in deep trouble. Growth is sluggish at best, unemployment punishingly high and deflation threatens. The European elections returned many populist, anti-EU members to the European Parliament; public support for the project has plummeted. Against this background, the squabble over who should be the next president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, looks an ever more dangerous tragicomedy: Franz Kafka meets Dario Fo.

The front-runner for the job is Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured). The former prime minister of Luxembourg was picked as “lead candidate” by the centre-right pan-European political group, the European People’s Party (EPP), in March. He stands for the cosy [sic] federalist consensus that many European voters want to change. He was an ineffectual head of the euro group of finance ministers, creating doubts over his ability to run the commission—a huge job at the moment.